


Divergence

by Chevy



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childbirth, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 05:21:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10802595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chevy/pseuds/Chevy
Summary: A different birth for the Skywalker twins, a different fate for Anakin Skywalker.





	Divergence

The Jedi Council had forbidden Obi Wan from searching for his padewan, but eventually the Clone Wars took him just far enough away from Corescant that when he slipped away, they didn’t know for three days. And three days was all it took for him to follow the scant trace of Anakin, to track a tendril of consciousness through the Force until he eventually landed on, of all places, Alderaan.

Far out of the cities, tucked into the side of a mountain, he followed a thinly worn path to a village. The Alderaanians who lived there were surprised to see a stranger, and when he told them he was looking for a friend, they eventually told him where to find a tiny cottage, further up the mountain itself.

The young man who answered the door was Anakin.

His hair was longer still, curling against his shoulders, and he was wide-eyed, haggard, frantic. He threw open the door while looking over his shoulder into the house, holding a rag in one hand and a teapot in the other.

“Talla, finally! The contractions-” Anakin stopped short and whipped his head around. His hair was in his face.

The two men stared at one another. Slowly, as if a few strands of hair could obscure his vision enough to mistake Obi Wan’s identity, Anakin pushed it roughly to the side. He blanched.

“Master! How did you find us?” he breathed. \

He looked wounded, terrified.

Uncomfortably, Obi Wan shoved his hands into his sleeves and glared at him. “Anakin, you are my padawan! My friend. I will always be able to find you and I assume you’ve got Senator Amidala up here as well in this little-” just as Obi Wan was getting warmed up, a woman’s shrill bellow of agony tore out from behind Anakin. They both jumped.

Anakin’s frenetic energy, temporarily put on hold by the shock of Obi Wan’s appearance, exploded out once more. “You can’t be here! I told you not to look for me, I told you that it wouldn’t be safe-”

“Anakin?” came the voice again, and this time Obi Wan recognised it.

“What’s wrong with Padme? She sounds hurt!” he demanded, pushing into the cottage.

Anakin elbowed his way in front of the Jedi and glared over his shoulder. He was marching across a comfortable, well-loved kitchen and living area towards a slightly off-centre door at the other side. “Of course she sounds hurt: she’s having a baby,” he snapped, and disappeared into the other room.

Obi Wan stopped short in the middle of the room. Shock planted his feet firmly to the thin rug on the reed-covered floor. As his mind whirled, he took in the lovely lace curtains on the window above the sink, earthenware dishes stacked beside it. A huge copper kettle boiled over a fireplace in the middle of the room and a pot-bellied stove steamed in the kitchen. There was a beautiful, fine vase full of wildflowers on the table, tools scattered on the table beside a chair that had been hurriedly pushed back.

“Anni, oh, Anni, where’s Talla? What’s wrong?” Padme’s voice broke him out of his trance.

He looked towards the door, which Anakin had left open. Laying on small bed with an overstuffed mattress, dressed in a cotton shift far plainer than anything Obi Wan had ever seen her wear, gleaming with sweat and her teeth bared in pain, was Padme. Anakin was kneeling beside her, dampening the rag he’d had in his hand to mop her brow.

“Why do you have the teapot?” she asked breathlessly.

He looked at it uselessly. “Uh. I’m not sure.”

Padme huffed, and then another contraction overtook her. In the midst of it, she spotted Obi Wan standing awkwardly in the doorway. Though she couldn’t speak through her gritted teeth, she looked, bewildered, at Anakin. When her husband shook his head, she screamed.

“He’s not taking you! You’re…you’re not…taking him! Ahhh!”

Quickly, Obi Wan rushed to her other side, taking her hand. “Padme, no. Shh, shh, shh; it’s alright,” he reassured her.

“Why…how…” she panted.

Tenderly, Obi Wan brushed sweat-tangled hair away from Padme’s face. “Don’t worry about any of that now. You just concentrate on this wonderful thing you’re doing,” he said soothingly.

“Wonderful!” she hissed disparagingly, massaging the shifting mass of her abdomen.

“Just breathe, Padme,” Anakin pleaded.

She gripped both the Jedi’s hands in a white-knuckled grip. “That is very easy for you to say over there, Anakin Skywalker!”

Fear lanced across Anakin’s face. “Where the hells is that midwife?!”

“She’ll be here. Anni,” Padme forced him to look her in the face. “I’m okay,” she said forcefully.

It seemed to Obi Wan like a strange thing for a woman in childbirth to say to a man, and if anything it only made more colour drain out of Anakin’s face. Suddenly, before any of them could say anything further, there was the sound outside of an approaching speeder, a small, light one desperately in need of tuning. Obi Wan got to his feet automatically.

Anakin froze like prey on the other side of the bed. “Did you bring others? Master?” he sounded like a child, like a terrified slave-boy from Tattooine.

“No. Nobody know where I am. I am supposed to be out on Alderaanian satellite dispute.”

They both heaved sighs of relief. Anakin got to his feet, kissing Padme’s sweaty forehead as he stood. “Force! That must be her. I’ll go bring her down. Mast…Obi Wan?”

He looked across a birthing bed at his young apprentice and saw a young man full of fear and doubt and joy. “Yes, Anakin?”

“Will you watch her for me? While I get the midwife?” he begged quietly, and he was asking for far more than his words.

Obi Wan looked down at Padme, still gripping both their hands. “Of course,” he swore it like an oath and knelt on the floor beside the bed again.

She offered him a weak, intensely grateful smile as Anakin hurried out the door. Watching him leave, she suddenly gave a breathless giggle.

“What is it?”

“He’s still holding…the teapot,” she gasped.

 

The midwife, Talla, was a tall, limber, no-nonsense woman whose first order of business was to try and remove both men from the birthing room. Anakin wouldn’t have it.

“I’m not leaving her,” he snarled, a blackness in his voice that made Obi Wan shiver.  “I am not leaving you. Not now, not ever. I won’t leave you!” his voice broke and he fell hard to his knees by her side.

“For the love of-! Women do this every day, boy! Now get out and let us work,” Talla snapped.

“Not _this_ woman!” Anakin roared at her, his rage so forceful she actually took a step back.

“Anakin…” Padme moaned, closing her eyes.

The exiled Jedi’s terror in that moment was a tangible thing. “Padme! Padme, please-”

She gave his hand a shake, her eyes open before he’d finished speaking. “I’m resting, Anakin, please! I am okay, I am not going to die.”

Tears escaped Anakin’s eyes. She touched his face tenderly. Understanding dawned on Talla’s face and she placed a gentle hand on Anakin’s trembling shoulders.

“Boy. Let me work and I will do what I can to ensure she sees this through,” she assured him, far more gently than she had before.

“You had best hope that is enough,” said Anakin, dark promise in every inch of him as he got to his feet and stalked out of the room. He swept past Obi Wan in a wave of fear and fury. Automatically, he bowed to the two women and shut the door on his way out.

Anakin was slicing kindling without the axe when Obi Wan stepped outside. The Force curved around his hands like a lover’s embrace as he split the logs into pieces so thin they were less than splinters.

“I dreamed of this day.”

“Most men do. A _child_ , Anakin. Why didn’t you-”

Anakin rounded on him. “I dreamed of her dying, screaming, bloodied, from bringing this child into the world! I have dreamed of it less and less since we ran away, since we came here,” he pitched a log against the rock wall and it shattered. “But last night I had that dream again! And now you’re here. A reminder of everything we escaped, of everything we had to flee from! Politics and war and death. If you have bought all that onto my child, I’ll-”

“You left without saying a word, Anakin! You left in the night and I searched! You left me to search under every rock and behind every bush, while the Council scorched your name from our records and forbid me to so much as mention either one of you!” Obi Wan shouted, facing Anakin’s rage without any fear of his own.

The pain of years of searching spilled out of Obi Wan: pus from a wound he didn’t even know was infected.

Anakin stretched his arms wide in surrender. “What else could I do?! They would never have allowed us to be together as we wanted, and the more time went by, the more we realised this was the only answer!”

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me?!” Obi Wan roared.

They both stopped, because there. That was where the real hurt was.

“I didn’t trust you,” admitted Anakin softly.

“How could you not trust _me_?” he demanded in return.

Anakin shrugged. From inside the house, there was a long shout. He winced. “I couldn’t trust anyone. There was…stirrings…” he looked up, a shadow in his eyes. “Palpatine is not to be trusted. He is strong with the Dark Side of the force. You must trust me on this, Master,” he pleaded.

That, thought Obi Wan tiredly, nicely summed up the niggling feeling in the back of his head that he had been ignoring ever since Anakin had left.

He was staring at him, sure that Obi Wan wouldn’t believe him, when the truth was he was all too willing to take this as evidence. For the hours before Talla appeared, they spoke no more of the Force or Palpatine, or of Anakin returning to Coroscant to bring down the budding regime.

Talla gave Anakin a smile when she ducked out of the door. He rushed over to her, his body straining towards his wife. “She is very weak, very tired. There’s still bleeding. She needs some liver and kidney and my good tea. A lot of it. But she will live.”

“And the baby?” Anakin asked, an afterthought, already moving inside.

Talla grinned. “Oh, about that.”

Two tiny, pink wailing things with milky blue eyes and perfect, soft heads were soon cradled in Anakin’s arms. He stared down at them, too overwhelmed even to cry or soothe them, and softly one, then the other, gave up screaming and settled into sleep.

“The boy is Luke. The girl is Leia,” said Anakin, roughly, when Obi Wan peered in carefully.

He held Luke Skywalker in his arms while Anakin gently placed his daughter in her cradle. The tiny infant murmured and his delicate fingers opened and closed around Obi Wan’s finger. In that moment, he knew perfectly why Jedi were not allowed to love, because this kind of adoration bubbling in his chest was dangerous in it’s absolution.

And only a Sith dealt in absolutes.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a short post on my blog (runesrule on tumblr) about the way in which Fanfiction authors exploit points of a plot where the events and character developments can diverge. That post inspired this piece, if you're interested in checking it out.


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